Riding a motorcycle
every day might actually keep your brain functioning at peak condition,
or so says a study conducted by the University of Tokyo. The study
demonstrated that riders between the age of 40 and 50 were shown to
improve their levels of cognitive functioning, compared to a control
group, after riding their motorcycles daily to their workplace for a mere two months.
Scientists believe that the extra concentration needed to
successfully operate a motorcycle can contribute to higher general
levels of brain function, and it’s that increase in activity that’s
surely a contributing factor to the appeal of the motorcycles as
transportation. It’s the way a ride on a bike turns the simplest journey
into a challenge to the senses that sets the motorcyclist apart from
the everyday commuter. While the typical car-owning motorist is just
transporting him or her self from point A to point B, the motorcyclist
is actually transported into an entirely different state of
consciousness .
Riding a motorcycle is all about entrance into an exclusive club where the journey actually
is the destination.
Dr Ryuta Kawashima, author of
Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain, reported the outcome of his study of “The relationship between motorcycle riding and the human mind.”
Kawashima’s experiments involved current riders who currently rode
motorcycles on a regular basis (the average age of the riders was 45)
and ex-riders who once rode regularly but had not taken a ride for 10
years or more. Kawashima asked the participants to ride on courses in
different conditions while he recorded their brain activities. The eight
courses included a series of curves, poor road conditions, steep hills,
hair-pin turns and a variety of other challenges.
What did he find? After an analysis of the data, Kawashima found that
the current riders and ex-riders used their brain in radically
different ways. When the current riders rode motorcycles, specific
segments of their brains (the right hemisphere of the prefrontal lobe)
was activated and riders demonstrated a higher level of concentration.
His next experiment was a test of how making a habit of riding a motorcycle affects the brain.
Trial subjects were otherwise healthy people who had not ridden for
10 years or more. Over the course of a couple of months, those riders
used a motorcycle for their daily commute and in other everyday
situations while Dr Kawashima and his team studied how their brains and
mental health changed.
The upshot was that the use of motorcycles in everyday life improved
cognitive faculties, particularly those that relate to memory and
spatial reasoning capacity. An added benefit? Participants revealed on
questionnaires they filled out at the end of the study that their stress
levels had been reduced and their mental state changed for the better.
So why motorcycles? Shouldn’t driving a car should have the same effect as riding a motorcycle?
“There were many studies done on driving cars in the past,” Kawashima
said. “A car is a comfortable machine which does not activate our
brains. It only happens when going across a railway crossing or when a
person jumps in front of us. By using motorcycles more in our life, we
can have positive effects on our brains and minds”.
Yamaha participated in a second joint research project on the subject
of the relationship between motorcycle riding and brain stimulation
with Kawashima Laboratory at the Department of Functional Brain Imaging,
Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer at Tohoku University.
The project began in September 2009 and ran until December 2010, and
the focus of the research was on measurement and analysis of the cause
and effect relationship involved in the operation of various types of
vehicles and brain stimulation. The study measured changes in such
stimulation over time by means of data gathered from a long-term mass
survey.
The reason for Yamaha Motor’s participation in this project is pretty
obvious and not a little self-serving, but further research into the
relationship between motorcycle riding and brain stimulation as it
relates to the “Smart Aging Society” will certainly provide some
interesting results.
The second research project was divided into two time periods
throughout 2009 and 2010 compared differences in the conditions of brain
stimulation as they related to the type of vehicle and driving
conditions. A second set of tests measuring the changes in brain
stimulation over time involved a larger subject group.
Yamaha Motors provided
vehicles for the research and made its test tracks and courses
available for the study. What the study revealed is that what you’re
thinking about while you’re riding – and your experience on the bike -
changes the physical structure of your brain.
Author Sharon Begley concurs with Kawashima’s findings. In her tome,
Train Your Mind – Change Your Brain, Begley found much the same outcomes.
“The brain devotes more cortical real estate to functions that its
owner uses more frequently and shrinks the space devoted to activities
rarely performed,” Begley wrote. “That’s why the brains of violinists
devote more space to the region that controls the digits of the
fingering hand.”
And you may also get some mental and physical benefits from
just thinking about going for a ride on your machine.
A 1996 experiment at Harvard Medical School by neuroscientist Alvaro
Pascual-Leone had volunteers practice a simple five finger exercise on
the piano over five days for a couple of hours each day. Pascual-Leone
found that the brain space devoted to these finger movements grew and
pushed aside areas less used. A separate group of volunteers were asked
to simply think about doing the piano exercises during that week as
well, and they dedicated the same amount of “practice time.”
Pascual-Leone was somewhat take aback to discover that the region of the brain which controls piano playing finger movement
expanded in the same way for volunteers who merely imagined playing the piano.
Along with the obvious benefits of riding motorcycles; like saving
money (motorcycle insurance is relatively inexpensive), motorcycles take
the edge off the grind of the daily commute, and that appears to make
your brain a better place to be…
Via
Krtong.com
